Predicting the Oscars: Who Will Get the Gold During Movie Award Season?

For the past few years I have been tracking and predicting which movies I think will receive Oscar nominations for the top eight awards. They are the statuettes for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor, and Best Supporting Actress. With five slots available for each of these awards, what follows is a look at which films and characters are most likely to slot in to the forty available Oscar nominations.

As each new year begins, film pundits sift through their notes and memory banks from the year just gone and try to predict who will be up for the Oscars when the nominations are announced on 22nd January. Studios tend to release their serious “award-worthy” fare in the Christmas period so that media coverage is current as various voting members go to the polls, but one adage holds true: Nominations breed nominations!

By the time the Oscar nominations will be announced, Academy members will have been heavily influenced by a slew of other “Best of ...” lists, and award ballots for the Golden Globes, the Directors’ Guild of America (DGA), Writers’ Guild of America (WGA), Screen Actors’ Guild (SAG), and American Film Institute (AFI) Top 10 of the Year, the National Society of Film Critics, not to mention last year’s Cannes Film Festival results. All told there are countless declarations of which movies deserve celebration for their overall quality, or specific acting, writing and directing talents. Each nomination feeds in to the studios’ respective marketing campaigns and promotional tour, with both quality and quantity fuelling coal-like a movie’s steam-driven journey towards Oscar glory. Movies proudly boast how many awards they are up for, and which organizations have recognized them, with promo lines advertising “9 Golden Globe Nominations!”, “Nominated for Best Director, Best Actor, Best blah blah blah”, or “On 72 Top 10 Movie of the Year Lists!” Some “trains” will come up short while others will make it to the big event.

So who will enter the history books as the cream of the crop for 2007, and be represented at the 2008 Academy Awards ceremony? I believe that there are twenty films that could get in to those top 40 nomination positions. Six films each tally four nominations apiece in my predictions (with directors in brackets):

“American Gangster” (Ridley Scott)
“Atonement” (Joe Wright)
“Charlie Wilson’s War” (Mike Nichols)
“Into The Wild” (Sean Penn)
“Michael Clayton” (Tony Gilroy)
“No Country for Old Men” (The Coen Brothers).

“Juno” (Jason Reitman) and “There Will Be Blood” (Paul Thomas Anderson) receive two each, with a further twelve films getting a single nod. In alphabetical order, they are:

“The Assassination of Jesse James" (Andrew Dominik)
“Away From Her” (Sarah Polley)
“The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” (Julian Schnabel)
“Enchanted” (Kevin Lima)
“Gone, Baby, Gone” (Ben Affleck)
“I’m Not There” (Todd Haynes)
“Lars and the Real Girl” (Craig Gillespie)
“La Vie En Rose” (Olivier Dahan)
“A Mighty Heart” (Michael Winterbottom)
“Ratatouille” (Brad Bird)
“The Savages” (Tamara Jenkins)
“Sweeney Todd” (Tim Burton).

Other films will of course receive some of the artistic and technical awards, and indeed the likes of “Atonement” will doubtless be nominated for other awards such as Best Cinematography and Best Costume Design too.

Here are my picks before we even know the Golden Globe results:

BEST PICTURE
American Gangster
Atonement
Charlie Wilson’s War
Into The Wild
No Country For Old Men

BEST DIRECTOR
Joel Coen & Ethan Coen (No Country for Old Men)
Joe Wright (Atonement)
Julian Schnabel (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly)
Ridley Scott (American Gangster)
Sean Penn (Into the Wild)

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY
Brad Bird (Ratatouille)
Diablo Cody (Juno)
Tony Gilroy (Michael Clayton)
Tamara Jenkins (The Savages)
Nancy Oliver (Lars and the Real Girl)

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY
Paul Thomas Anderson (There Will Be Blood)
Joel Coen & Ethan Coen (No Country for Old Men)
Christopher Hampton (Atonement)
Aaron Sorkin (Charlie Wilson’s War)
Steve Zaillian (American Gangster)

BEST ACTOR
George Clooney (Michael Clayton)
Daniel Day-Lewis (There Will Be Blood)
Johnny Depp (Sweeney Todd)
James McAvoy (Atonement)
Denzel Washington (American Gangster)

BEST ACTRESS
Amy Adams (Enchanted)
Julie Christie (Away From Her)
Marion Cotillard (La Vie En Rose)
Angelina Jolie (A Mighty Heart)
Ellen Page (Juno)

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
Casey Affleck (The Assassination of Jesse James)
Javier Bardem (No Country for Old Men)
Philip Seymour Hoffman (Charlie Wilson’s War)
Hal Holbrook (Into the Wild)
Tom Wilkinson (Michael Clayton)

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Cate Blanchett (I’m Not There)
Catherine Keener (Into the Wild)
Julia Roberts (Charlie Wilson’s War)
Amy Ryan (Gone, Baby, Gone)
Tilda Swinton (Michael Clayton)

Due to the sheer volume of movies being made, it’s possible that these thirty-five films will miss out on the most notable Oscar categories entirely:

“Across The Universe” (Julie Taymor)
“Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead” (Sidney Lumet)
“The Brave One” (Neil Jordan)
“The Bucket List” (Rob Reiner)
“Dan In Real Life” (Peter Hedges)
“The Darjeeling Limited” (Wes Anderson)
“Elizabeth: The Golden Age” (Shekhar Kapur)
“Evening” (Lajos Koltai)
“The Feast of Love” (Robert Benton)
“Goya’s Ghosts” (Milos Forman)
“The Great Debaters” (Denzel Washington)
“Hairspray” (Adam Shankman)
“The Hoax” (Lasse Hallstrom)
“In The Valley of Elah” (Paul Haggis)
“The Kite Runner” (Marc Forster)
“Knocked Up” (Judd Apatow)
“Lions for Lambs” (Robert Redford)
“Love In The Time of Cholera” (Mike Newell)
“Lust, Caution” (Ang Lee)
“Margot at the Wedding” (Noah Baumbach)
“Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium” (Zach Helm)
“The Nanny Diaries” (Shari Springer Berman & Robert Pulcini)
“Once” (John Carney)
“Reign Over Me” (Mike Binder)
“Rendition” (Gavin Hood)
“Reservation Road” (Terry George)
“Silk” (Francois Girard)
“Sleuth” (Kenneth Branagh)
“Things We Lost in the Fire” (Susanne Bier)
“3:10 to Yuma” (James Mangold)
“Trade” (Marco Kreuzpaintner)
“We Own The Night” (James Gray)
“The Wind That Shakes The Barley” (Ken Loach)
“Youth Without Youth” (Francis Ford Coppola)
“Zodiac” (David Fincher)

I wouldn’t bet any money on who will win the Oscars this year, let alone who will make the final list of nominations. It doesn't feel like a year for overwhelming favourites. Hollywood is unsure about the awards season in light of the writers’ strike, so it will be interesting to see which movies do get recognised in this unusual climate, and whether anyone will even be at the Kodak Auditorium on 24th February to receive an Oscar!